Mark Olshaker - The Cases That Haunt Us: From Jack the Ripper to Jon Benet Ramsey, The FBIs Legendary Mindhunter Sheds New Light on the Mysteries That Wont Go Away

How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?

SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE,

The Sign of Four

INTRODUCTION

On its most essential level, criminology is about why people do the things they do; that is, it is about the human condition. And of all the millions of horrendous crimes that have been committed over the years, certain criminal cases seem to have lives of their own. Despite the passage of time, they continue their hold on our collective imagination, and our collective fears. For some reason, each of these cases and the stories surrounding them touches something deep in that human conditionbecause of the personalities involved, the senseless depravity of the crime, the nagging and persistent doubts about whether justice was actually done, or the tantalizing fact that no one was caught. In any event, the case remains a fascinating and perplexing mystery and gets to the core of how we see ourselves as human beings and our relationship to society.

Each of the cases well be examining in this book has remained extremely controversial. And each of these cases contains some universal truth at its base to which we can all relate. Taken together, they present a panorama of human behavior under extreme stress and an inevitable commentary on good and evil, innocence and guilt, expectation and surprise.

Through the cases well examine, we hope to show the uses, benefits, and limitations of modern behavioral profiling and criminal investigative analysis as practiced by the behavioral science units of the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. The operational division that actually does the profiling and case consultations has undergone several changes of name and designation. At the time that I was its chief until my retirement in 1995, it was known as the Investigative Support Unit, or ISU. Sometimes, we can go a long way in determining the identity of an unknown offender. Sometimes, we can only say who it is not. Sometimes, we cant do either. But weve greatly improved our ability to interpret forensic evidence from a behavioral standpoint. Had the discipline been around at the time of the earliest cases in this book, I believe we would have solved them and delivered the offenders to justice.

We will be focusing on several key themes that will be familiar to readers of our previous books. One is motive: why an individual decided to do what he did and how we try to determine that. Another is the evolution and development of the criminal: you dont just wake up one morning and commit any of these crimes without prior behavioral indicators and a specific precipitating stressor. A third is postoffense behavior: how an individual who has committed a serious crime may be expected to act and react afterward. All of these factors will go into our evaluations.

Lets get down to the nitty-gritty. Are we going to be able to solve each of these crimes that have tantalized and eluded experts for years, decades, or in two instances, more than a century?

Frankly, thats doubtful.

What we are going to do is to approach each one to some extent differently than its been approached in the past. Were going to look at and examine each one as I would have as a profiler and criminal investigative analyst for the FBI. Were going to use the crimes and crime-scene evidence to indicate the type of individual we should be looking for. Then well evaluate the subjectsthose suspected, accused, and/or convicted of the crimeto see how well they fit in.

In much of the revisionist-theory industry surrounding these cases, writers tend to decide what they think and then employ the evidence to support that theory. Then they essentially challenge skeptics to prove a negative. Among the examples of this phenomenon, which will become clear as you read on: